of the land?

Beautrelet lay until ten o'clock at night hanging over the precipice,
with his eyes riveted on the shadowy mass formed by the pyramid,
thinking and pondering with all the concentrated effort of his mind.

Then he went down to Etretat, selected the cheapest hotel, dined, went
up to his room and unfolded the document.

It was the merest child's play to him now to establish its exact
meaning. He at once saw that the three vowels of the word Etretat
occurred in the first line, in their proper order and at the necessary
intervals. This first line now read as follows:

e . a . a .. etretat . a ..

What words could come before Etretat? Words, no doubt, that referred to
the position of the Needle with regard to the town. Now the Needle
stood on the left, on the west--He ransacked his memory and,
recollecting that westerly winds are called vents d'aval on the coast
and that the nearest porte was known as the Porte d'Aval, he wrote down:

"En aval d'Etretat . a .."

The second line was that containing the word Demoiselles and, at once
seeing, in front of that word, the series of all the vowels that form
part of the words la chambre des, he noted the two phrases:

"En aval d'Etretat. La Chambre des Demoiselles."

The third line gave him more trouble; and it was not until some groping
that, remembering the position, near the Chambre des Demoiselles, of
the Fort de Frefosse, he ended by almost completely reconstructing the
document:

"En aval d'Etretat. La Chambre des Demoiselles. Sous le Fort de
Frefosse. L'Aiguille creuse."

These were the four great formulas, the essential and general formulas
which you had to know. By means of them, you turned en aval, that is to
say, below or west of Etretat, entered the Chambre des Demoiselles, in
all probability passed under Fort Frefosse and thus arrived at the
Needle.

How? By means of the indications and measurements that constituted the
fourth line:

[Illustration: drawing of an outline of paper with writing and drawing
on it--numbers, dots, some letters, signs and symbols...]

These were evidently the more special formulas to enable you to find
the outlet through which you made your way and the road that led to the
Needle.

Beautrelet at once presumed--and his surmise was no more than the
logical consequence of the document--that, if there really was a direct
communication between the land and the obelisk of the Needle, the
underground passage